Abram & Sarai (Genesis 12 - Part 2)

Thank you for listening to this message from the ministry of Morse Corner Church in Leverett, Massachusetts.

Morse Corner is a non -denominational church that is committed to the preaching and teaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Our church was founded in 1896 by two students of the famous evangelist

D .L. Moody. We seek to encourage and edify the body of Christ through the proclamation of God's Word through the ministries of the local church.

If you'd like more information, visit our website morsecornerchurch .com. We hope you enjoy the message.

So the land that God is promising to Abram is the land of Canaan. If you've been following along in this sermon series from Genesis, you remember that Canaan was actually an individual, right?

Canaan was the grandson of Noah, and because of what Ham did or what

Canaan did, they received, or he received, a curse. So the land that Canaan's descendants settled in is now going to be taken from them and given to God's chosen people.

So to have a nation, you need land. The Lord says, get out of your country, this is

Ur of the Chaldees, that's near Babel, and go to the land that I will show you.

This is the land of Canaan. And he says, I will make of you a great nation.

This implies that Abraham is going to have many descendants. So skip down to verse 7.

So Abraham leaves his homeland and he goes to this land God is promising him. Verse 7, it says, then the

Lord appeared to Abram and said, to your descendants I will give this land.

And there he built an altar to the Lord who had appeared to him.

And then the rest of the chapter, we're not going to cover it in depth, but then the rest of the chapter goes on to talk about Abraham and his wife,

Sarah. So here's the thing, Abram means father, Abraham, father of many nations.

You know, God changed not only his name, God changed someone else's name too. Who else's name did he change? Jacob. But even before that, stick with Abraham.

Sarah. Right. So her name originally was Sarai. You ever met anyone named

Sarai? Me either. It's usually Sarah. But Sarai means princess.

God changed her name to Sarah, meaning noble woman. And in Genesis 17, 16, the

Lord says to Sarah, I will bless her, or says about her, I will bless her and she shall be a mother of nations.

Kings of peoples shall be from her. So Abraham is the father of many nations,

Sarah, the mother of nations. So at this point, Abram and Sarai, because there's this great famine in the land, you know,

Abraham's not a perfect man. He should have trusted in God's promise and, hey, go to Canaan. But where does

Abraham end up going? Yeah, I mean, this is just the way people are. God says, hey, do this.

And they say, well, I'm going to do that. Go here. Well, I'm going to go, I'm going to go there. So yeah, they go down to Egypt because of this famine and they run into a little trouble, don't they?

Abraham, if I call him Abraham, you understand, right? He's Abram here, but either way.

So Abraham runs into this problem because he's afraid because Sarah, the Bible makes a big deal about Sarah being a beautiful woman.

She must have been gorgeous because the Bible makes a big deal about that. But he's worried that they're going to see his beautiful wife and he's married to her.

They're going to kill him and take her as their own, or Pharaoh will do that. So Abraham comes up with this little scheme.

You remember what it is? He tells Sarai, he says, okay, tell them you're my sister.

And that's his way of saving his own skin. But it puts Sarah into this very bad situation.

And again, I don't want to get off topic, but every sermon I've ever heard people always say, Abraham lied.

Abraham lied about his wife being his, well the thing is she was his sister. She was his half sister.

So I'm not willing to call it a lie, although it wasn't the full, it wasn't the full truth. But it puts her in this terrible situation because Pharaoh takes her and he's blessing her and he brings her into his harem, is what the commentators say.

Now let's turn to Romans chapter 4. And the only reason I bring that up, because it makes

Abraham look really, really bad, doesn't it? The Bible paints the characters of Scripture, it paints the saints, warts and all.

Abraham, again, he was not a perfect man, really not even close.

But Abraham was a man of faith. Say what you want about him, he did believe

God and his promises. So God's covenant with Abraham, and because Abraham believes

God, he does a lot of things wrong, but because he believes God, that's the foundation of the gospel.

You know, it kind of bothers me when a Christian does something and maybe they do something that, wow, that really sounds bad, that really looks bad, and people's automatic response, well

I don't even think that person saved them. Wait a minute, I thought we were saved by faith and not by works.

Isn't that true? Now if it's a whole life or there's never any growth and there's never any change, that's another story.

But we're saved by faith. So let's look at chapter 4 of Romans, because this covenant with Abraham, the covenant of promise, is tied in with the gospel.

All Abraham has to do is trust God. That's all he has to do.

All Abraham had to do was believe. And it's the same thing for the

New Testament gospel. How is a person saved? By believing upon the name of the

Lord Jesus Christ. You add anything to that, I don't care what it is, you add anything to that, that's a works based salvation.

It's a different gospel. We saw that in the book of Galatians. The Judaizers, they just wanted to add one little thing, let's add circumcision.

Paul said, let them be anathema. It's a different gospel. So salvation is by what?

It's by, yes, technical, it's by grace through faith.

So let me just expand on that. Nobody is saved by giving X amount of money.

Nobody is saved by keeping a list of rules. Nobody is going to heaven because they went through some sort of religious ceremony.

A person is only justified by God through their faith in the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ.

That's it. That's it. Now are Christians called to do something?

Are we called to do things? Of course we are. Obviously, just like Abraham, he had to do something.

He had to leave his father's house. He had to go to a land that God showed him. So he had to do something.

And there's certainly things that we are called to do. But we are put in a right relationship with God through Jesus, through faith only.

And you say, well, you keep repeating that. Right, because I think most people don't really get that. Okay, so we, like Abraham, then are called to live lives of faith.

Okay, so here in Rome, you're in Romans chapter 4? Okay, good. Here the

Apostle Paul is explaining the fullness of the gospel. And to do that, he points back to this story about Abraham.

Look at Romans 4, starting in verse 1. Paul says, what then shall we say that Abraham our father has found according to the flesh?

For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God.

For what does the scripture say? Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness.

Now to him who works, that is the person who's working for their salvation, the wages are not counted as grace, but as debt.

So if you think you can do something to earn salvation, if that were true, that would mean that God owes it to you.

And then it's no longer of grace, right? Verse 5, but to him who does not work, but believes on him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is accounted for righteousness.

Just as David also describes the blessedness of the man to whom God imputes righteousness apart from works.

And here's this quotation, blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven and whose sins are covered.

Blessed is the man to whom the Lord shall not impute sin.

You see, everybody in this world has some guilt, and some people are weighed down by their guilt.

The only way to really get rid of that guilt is to place your faith in Jesus, and if you do that, all of your lawless deeds are forgiven.

It doesn't matter what you've done in the past, no matter what it is, it's all forgiven.

That is grace. So this quote that Abraham was justified, this is a quote from Genesis 15 verse 6, that's when

God took Abraham outside. He was an old man at this point, no children, his wife's an old woman, she's barren anyways, no possibility of children, and God tells him to look up at the stars, and he says, if you can count them, so shall your descendants be.

And the scripture says that Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him for righteousness.

So Abraham was saved by believing, by his faith in the promises of God.

You know what God wants more than all? He just wants you to believe him. God just wants you to trust him.

That's really what God wants the most. He wants us to trust him and believe his word.

After all, he's God. He's faithful. He's trustworthy, isn't he?

Amen? Even if you don't say amen, he's still trustworthy. Now that applies in certain areas, right?

If God says that something happened, like the flood and Noah's Ark, well, if you're a believer, then you do what?

You believe, right? If God says something is going to happen, like Jesus is going to return one day, a believer believes

God's promise. In other words, today, having faith, what it looks like practically in our lives is we believe the

Bible and we seek to live accordingly. Abraham didn't have a leather -bound book with 66 smaller books in it, but he had

God's word, and he responded. He believed what God said, and he left his homeland.

And that couldn't have been easy, but he did it anyways. You know, sometimes God calls us to do things that aren't easy, but they're best if we trust

God. So God told him he was going to have a son in his old age, and that, of course, seemed ridiculous.

That seemed impossible to the average person, but Abraham, yeah, God says it, that settles it.

He was saved. He was justified at that moment. So Abraham and Sarah, to have a child at their age was impossible, and just think of the events from then on out, okay?

So what's the likelihood? I want you to consider the odds for a moment. It's not something we usually do, but consider the odds or the likelihood that that child born to Abraham and Sarah, that that child would have children, and that child children, and they would develop into this large family that would one day become a mighty nation, and they would possess the exact land that God said they would possess.

So after 2 ,000 years or so, now they are a mighty nation. And then 2 ,000 years after that, which brings us up until today, that all of the world has been blessed because of the

Messiah who came through that line. That this little family of just Abraham, Sarah, and then

Isaac would develop into the nation of Israel. Out of the nation of Israel comes

Jesus and 12 disciples, 120 people in the upper room on the day of Pentecost, and now that just spread to cover the entire globe.

Think about that. What are the odds? 100 % because God says it.

But what is God doing in all of that? He's keeping his promises. What's God doing in that?

He's proving, he's proving to the world that his word is true.

And now through the gospel, still through the gospel, God is changing this world one person at a time.

I know you look at the situation out there today and you think, well maybe not all of you think this, but we're tempted to think this.

Like, God can't you do a little more? Can't you do this over here and take care of that over there?

You've thought that, I know you have. We grow impatient, maybe we lack vision, and we think that God should kind of hurry up with some of these things that we're praying for.

We want to see more progress, right? Did Abraham ever see his descendants really?

No, he didn't. He had patience. You remember one time he got impatient, and that led to Hagar and the birth of the illegitimate child,

Ishmael. And they've been paying for it ever since. They're still paying for it. They're still at odds, the descendants in the

Middle East. So the point is, don't grow impatient. Part of having faith is trusting in God, and that God is going to do these things in his time.

Thanks for listening. I'm Pastor Michael Grant from Morris Cornick Church. If you'd like to listen to the complete message, or if you'd like more information about the ministry, visit our website morriscornickchurch .com.

We'd love to have you join us some Sunday morning here in Leverett. Until next time, may the grace of God be with you.